Apple Isn’t Just Selling Another iPhone — It’s Looking for Its Next Growth Engine
For his first major product presentation, J. Ternus had several new products to unveil: an iPhone 18 Pro that looks remarkably similar to its predecessor, an Apple Watch capable of detecting surrounding sounds and displaying them as text, and a new generation of AirPods.
But only one announcement really stole the show: the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable smartphone.
And Apple isn’t positioning it as an affordable niche product. Starting at €2,339, or $1,999 in the US, the Duo is now the most expensive iPhone ever released.
Raising prices without simply raising prices
The timing is no coincidence.
Apple is dealing with rising component costs, particularly for memory chips, while the global smartphone market is expected to shrink by 14% in 2026, according to Counterpoint.
In that environment, simply selling essentially the same smartphone at a higher price becomes harder to justify. The iPhone 18 Pro itself is $100 more expensive than the previous generation, despite relatively limited changes.
The foldable gives Apple another option: create a new premium category where a significantly higher price feels more justified.
“iPhone demand has reached a point of saturation,” says E. Lee, an analyst at Jefferies. In his view, Apple now needs to focus on new form factors rather than relying solely on gradual price increases.
Foldables are still a tiny market
That said, it would be a mistake to overestimate the Duo’s immediate impact.
Foldable smartphones still account for just 2.2% of global smartphone sales, according to IDC. Even if Apple sells more than 12 million units in 2027, that would represent only around 5% of total iPhone sales, according to Counterpoint.
So Apple probably isn’t launching the Duo because it expects massive sales volumes right away.
The bigger objective appears to be laying the groundwork for its next wave of growth.
The Duo could be the first piece of a much broader product strategy. E. Lee describes it as the beginning of a 3-to-5-year cycle of new product launches, designed to reignite consumer interest in the brand.
And Apple’s pipeline could extend well beyond smartphones: augmented-reality glasses, a home robot, and even a camera-equipped AI-powered pendant have all been reported as potential products for the coming years.
Apple is playing a game it knows well
The irony is that foldable smartphones are hardly new. Samsung, Huawei and other manufacturers have been competing in the category for years.
But Apple has rarely needed to be first.
Its approach has typically been to wait for a technology to mature, then try to turn it into a product simple and compelling enough for the mainstream.
That’s exactly what will make the Duo so interesting to watch.
Apple will have to convince consumers that its foldable display is reliable enough to justify the price — while also giving them compelling reasons to actually use the new form factor.
If the Duo ends up being nothing more than an iPhone that folds, its price could become its biggest selling point… and its biggest weakness.
But if Apple manages to change how people actually use an iPhone, it could have created an entirely new category capable of gradually becoming the next chapter of the smartphone.
A symbol of Apple’s next era
For J. Ternus, the presentation was therefore about more than just launching another product.
Even the decision to bring back Steve Jobs’ famous “One more thing” line to introduce the Duo was clearly deliberate. It was a nod to Apple’s past — and an attempt to make the foldable feel like a defining moment in the iPhone story.
The question now is whether the Duo will simply become Apple’s version of a foldable smartphone, or whether it will mark the beginning of an entirely new generation of products.
